Individuals, groups, associations, organizations, and/or other types of entities interested in using, installing, distributing, selling, acquiring, compiling, aggregating, and/or otherwise intermingling and/or interacting with legally-protectable content such as music, art, video, text, multimedia, technology (e.g., software), technological/business know-how, contract rights, and/or any other type of content that is protectable under patent law, copyright law, trademark law, trade secret law, contract law, and/or under other legal bases need to consider the individual rights, restrictions, and/or prohibitions established by content owners for the use, distribution, modification, combination, interaction, and/or other manipulation of such content to avoid infringing upon the content owners' rights in that content.
For example, an information technology professional, such as a Chief Information Officer of a corporation, may want to ensure that a license whose terms govern manipulations of a software element being considered for installation and integration within a corporation's technological infrastructure is authentic and that such terms coincide with the information technology professional's expectations so as to avoid infringing a content owner's rights in that software element and exposing the corporation to unexpected legal/financial liabilities. The risk of infringing a content owner's rights in a software element is increased when such elements are used in collaborative development environments in which entities developing particular software elements share such elements with other entities, who may be potentially unrelated to the developing entities. Unlike traditional development environments in which a single entity controls the entire development of a software product and the ownership and rights in the software product are well known and/or readily identifiable, the software products generated, at least in part, by aggregating software elements from multiple entities in a collaborative development environment, obfuscate the legal rights, obligations, restrictions, and/or prohibitions that pertain to an aggregated software product and thus increase the risk that the makers, distributors, installers, maintainers, users, and/or other entities associated with an aggregated software product may infringe upon the legal rights of one or more of the entities that developed the constituent software elements that were incorporated into the aggregated software product.
Although content owners can mitigate the uncertainty in the legal rights associated with particular aggregated content by forming licenses that explicitly set forth the rights, obligations, restrictions and/or prohibitions governing the use of aggregated content (e.g., the GNU General Public License, the Berkeley Software Distribution License, the Mozilla Public License, etc.), it becomes increasingly more difficult to do so as the number of collaborating content owners and the complexity of the aggregated content increase. Accordingly, entities participating in a collaborative environment have a continuing interest in developing technologies that can mitigate the risk of infringing another's rights in legally-protectable content incorporated into an aggregated content product and/or service.